- it is explicitly (or at least formerly) not considered a currency
- it is centralized (the company can freeze accounts if it wants, create more coins, or be sued)
- it's major use case is for inter-bank transfers. So if Bank A and Bank B was to exchange currency x for y, they will use XRP in-between. But this gives no value to the currency itself, it is just used as an intermediary. Is it conceivable that Ripple the company will not have enough XRP for these internal bank transfers and they are going to have to buy them back from the public??
So it seems that XRP has no value outside its use by the company Ripple. Is anyone actually using it for commerce or any other reason? It is not considered a store of value like bitcoin (in any case one would want something decentralized.
One reason is because they could profit from it. 2nd is it is being hyped that is why the price shoots up, remember that this are bankers that has a money to control the price.And 3rd is be realistic. Banks won't go anywhere, they will try to adopt in order for them to survive.